The Poll On Post-COVID Church Attendance

There's been a small stir this week over a new Gallup poll that says church attendance in the United States is lower than it was before the COVID lockdowns. On one hand, this shouldn't be a surprise, as stories have already covered this without the need for Gallup to ask about it again. A Pew Research poll just this past March reported:

There are some indications that in-person engagement in religious services has declined slightly since 2019, before the COVID-19 outbreak. The share of all U.S. adults who say they typically attend religious services at least once a month is down modestly but measurably (by 3 percentage points, from 33% to 30%) over that span, and one-in-five Americans say they now attend in person less often than they did before the pandemic.

The Gallup results aren't much different, so I'm not sure why anyone bothered. Per the first link,

In the Gallup survey, 31 percent of respondents said they have attended church, synagogue, mosque or temple in the past seven days.

In Gallup polls conducted from 2020 to the most recent poll — gathered May 1-24, 2023 — an average of 30 percent of respondents said they attended services in the past week.

This data represents a modest decline of an average of 4 points since the four years before the pandemic, when an average of 34 percent of respondents said they attended church, synagogue, mosque or temple in the past seven days.

Neither poll strikes me as meaningful. I could run a survey that asks people if they've flossed their teeth in the past week, and some would probably say they had just to look good to the pollster -- and by the same token, some might say they've been to church when they hadn't for the same reason -- except that these days, there's a growing number of people who'll say they didn't go to church when they did, because they're more and more suspicious of the hidden state devices the pollster potentially represents.

So The Hill, reporting on the Gallup results, quotes Gallup:

“It is not clear if the pandemic is the cause of the reduced attendance or if the decline is a continuation of trends that were already in motion. However, the temporary closure of churches and ongoing COVID-19 avoidance activities did get many Americans out of the habit of attending religious services weekly,” the Gallup survey found.

I had a gut feeling from the start of the lockdowns that they were aimed in considerable part at shutting down churches, or maybe more accurately, putting a coup de grace to something that creeping secularism had already set in a terminal decline. Discussions of the lockdowns' impact certainly include the parishes that were forced to shut down permanently when they lost the revenue from in-person offerings at services.

And it's worth pointing out that the Pew Research Center is a subsidiary of the Pew Charitable Trusts, the philanthropic arm of the Pew family, who made their money from Sun Oil and who, like other uber-wealthy families, are preoccupied mainly with playing life's video game with an invincibility cheat code. In this, they shape the views of legacy media and prosper the operations of state security. On the whole, they would prefer that religious observance fade from the scene, and it's mildly encouraging that their research into the result of the state's effort to stamp it out once and for all was equivocal at best.

One big defect in the polls' methodology is the imprecision of their premise. They're trying to measure "religious observance" or "church attendance" while asking respondents to self-report on whether they've done something good or bad, and this is under conditions where at least some respondents will have come to be reluctant to tell a perceived proxy for state security that they've in fact been to church.

And the polls leave out important context. The lawsuits against California and New York lockdowns that were brought by Catholics, ultra-orthodox Jews, and Pentecostals in 2020 were the first major blows to the COVID lockdown regime. In other words, religious institutions, especially of the more observant type, fought back, and they fought back successfully.

In addition, the post-COVID emergence of the anti-trans movement is based almost entirely on natural law, which is to say natural religion. Insofar as professional athletes have refused to wear Pride totems or endorse Pride nights, for instance, they cite religious belief, and as a practical matter, that's their only option, since the only alternative is simply to say they're transphobes.

This in fact has caused pro-trans bodies like the Human Rights Campaign, which understands "human rights" to include the right of a male to use female rest facilities, officially to declare

a state of emergency for LGBTQ+ people in the United States for the first time in its more than 40-year history, following an unprecedented and dangerous spike in anti-LGBTQ+ legislative assaults sweeping state houses this year.

The "anti-LGBTQ+" measures the HRC lists include transgender sports bans (21 states); gender-affirming care bans (20 states) restricing bodily mutilations on minors; and bathroom bans (9 states) prohibiting males from entering female rest facilities in schools and sometimes general public spaces. If anything, that the HRC should acknowledge that this is a setback for its agenda suggests that there's a resurgence in a certain type of religious belief, because the philosophical underpinning of this resistance can only be based on the historical undestanding of natural relgion and natural law.

There's a general understanding that people responding to polls are inclined to tell pollsters what they think they want to hear, and this must certainly apply to a pollster who asks people if they've been to church lately. Given the increasing distrust among the general population for the anti-religious bias in institutions like the FBI, the public health establishment, and polls themselves, it seems as though they should be factoring in an increasing willingness in the public to conceal church attendance, to decide politely that it's none of their business (which it isn't), which in turn makes polls like Gallup and Pew on this subject less and less meaningful.

At the same time, crises lke the ones we see building on a national and world level are likely to reinforce the instinct to turn to religion in times of trouble. If I were the powers who'd commissioned Gallup and Pew to find out, in effect, how we did in killing religion with the COVID pretext, the answer would be that at best, any progress was imperceptible in the short term, but over the longer term, it will have proven counterproductive.